Wide receiver Mike Williams played a minor role in the Jets offense during their season-opening loss to the 49ers, but the team says that they’ll be working to change that in the coming games.
Williams is coming off a torn ACL and didn’t play in the preseason after signing with the Jets this spring, so it’s not surprising that the team eased him into the mix in his first game. Nine snaps is still a low number, however, and head coach Robert Saleh said the plan to get Williams more time was impacted by only running 51 offensive plays. The hope is for more on all fronts against the Titans in Week Two and in the weeks to follow.
“We were trying to get to 15 last week,” Saleh said, via SNY. “Obviously, there weren’t enough opportunities. We were pacing that a little bit. If we would have gotten to a 65-play game like it normally would be, we would have been on pace. Long story short, we’re trying to get him on the field more.”
There’s plenty of things the Jets would like to see go differently after losing the opener and Williams’s impact on the offense is one of the top items on that list.
Titans receiver DeAndre Hopkins is off the team’s injury report this week after being limited by his knee injury all of last week.
Coach Brian Callahan expects Hopkins to have a bigger role this week after he played only 17 snaps and made one catch for 8 yards.
“Likely to be closer to full,” Callahan said this week. “Still be mindful of what we’re asking as he gets in shape and starts to feel better and better. But, yeah, I see his role increasing.”
A week ago, Hopkins said he tore his medial collateral ligament in a July 31 practice, causing him to miss all of training camp. On Thursday, Hopkins clarified that his knee injury is a sprain.
“A sprain is a sprain and a tear is a tear. If it was a tear, I wouldn’t be here right now. It was a sprain,” Hopkins said, via Jim Wyatt of the team website.
Hopkins led the Titans with 75 receptions for 1,057 yards and seven touchdowns last season, but they added Calvin Ridley and Tyler Boyd to the receivers room this offseason.
Titans quarterback Will Levis made “a bonehead play” in the season opener, but he said on Wednesday that he’s not letting it affect his confidence heading into Week Two.
Levis tried to backhand a pass rather than take a sack with the Titans up 17-16 on the Bears in the fourth quarter in Week One and Bears cornerback Tyrique Stevenson picked it off for a game-winning touchdown. On Wednesday, Levis said that he’s been able to move past the error and keep his head up heading into this weekend.
“There have been times where a game like that would have lingered for days, weeks, and really just kept getting to me,” Levis said, via the team’s website. “But I didn’t lose sleep Sunday night. I know that I’m a good quarterback in this league, and obviously there’s a lot of things to get better on. But watching that tape, I still have that confidence and knowing it’s a fluke play that I can definitely learn from. I still have all the confidence in the world in this team and everything. Just have to come to work the same way regardless of what happens.”
The fourth quarter pick stood out, but Levis had two other turnovers that helped hand the game to a Bears team that could do nothing offensively and ball control was an issue for him during his rookie season as well. If he can’t show improvement on that front, Levis may wind up being the only one confident in his ability to handle the job.
Jamal Adams has missed 29 of the past 39 games, but he guarantees he will play this week against his former team and against Aaron Rodgers.
“I’ll be there,” Adams said, via Nick Suss of The Tennessean. “Oh, I’ll be there. Oh yeah, I’ll be there. I’ll be there.”
Adams, who missed the season opener with a hip injury, had a full practice Wednesday. It was one of fewer than 10 times he has practiced in any capacity since signing with the Titans in July.
Injuries to his left quad and a knee cut short the past two seasons for Adams, who was drafted in the first round by the Jets in 2017 and traded to the Seahawks in 2020. He said his hip injury this season isn’t directly connected to those injuries but a by-product of what the toll of the injuries have done to his body and his routine.
He said missing out on training camp in 2022 and 2023 prevented him from developing the “callouses” he needed.
“As a football player, you definitely need those things to get ready for the season because it’s a long season,” Adams said. “Games are long — 60 minutes. I feel like my body kind of went in shock a little bit. It just wasn’t ready. Well, I’m not going to say it wasn’t ready. But it was just more so like it wasn’t used to the cutting and the conditioning as much and a constant pace of football. . . . I was feeling good. And it just so happened that it didn’t work out for me. My body just kind of locked up on me for whatever reason. I had to listen to it. I know my body now. As shitty as it is, obviously I want to be out there with my team, but it didn’t work out like that for me.”
Aaron Rodgers didn’t spell the word this time, but he sent the same message to the Jets that he once sent to the Packers.
Rodgers said everyone needed to “R-E-L-A-X” after the Packers started 1-2 in the 2014 season and he said that the same advice applies to the Jets as they move forward from the 32-19 loss to the 49ers on Monday night. Rodgers said the team has to “stick to the process” because there’s a lot more football to be played.
“I think we always gotta stay relaxed,” Rodgers said. “It’s a long season. I think, at times, people think the season is like you’re out in the prairie or the desert and you’re wandering around trying to find water. It’s more like a nice, slow Bolero, where we’re just swaying with the music and reacting to whatever comes to us and through us, just trying to not get too high with the highs or too low with the lows. The league is a lot different than when I said relax years ago in that there’s just so much more coverage, so much more opportunity for overreaction.”
The Jets weren’t favored to win on the road against the defending NFC champions, so it’s not a tough sell to hold off on panic even if the team didn’t look as good as they would have hoped. Another sluggish performance against the Titans this week is unlikely to be so easy to shrug off as part of the process.
The Titans are giving one of their defensive players a promotion.
Tennessee announced on Wednesday that the club has signed defensive lineman James Lynch to the 53-man roster off the club’s practice squad.
Lynch was on the field for seven defensive snaps in the season-opening loss to the Bears.
A fourth-round pick in the 2020 draft, Lynch has played 38 games with three starts for the Vikings and Titans. He’s recorded 2.0 sacks with four tackles for loss and two QB hits.
Tennessee also announced that the club has signed linebacker Kyron Johnson to its practice squad.
It’s said that you are what your record says you are, but Jets head coach Robert Saleh prefers his losing record after one game this year to the winning one his team had last year.
Saleh’s club looked overmatched on both sides of the ball in Monday night’s 32-19 loss to the 49ers, but quarterback Aaron Rodgers didn’t leave the game after four snaps with a torn Achilles. That’s what happened on the first Monday night of the 2023 season and that’s why Saleh says it feels better to be 0-1 even though the Jets pulled out an overtime win over the Bills a year ago.
“You know what? Unfortunately, it does,” Saleh said, via Rich Cimini of ESPN.com.
Offensive rough patches were to be expected given Rodgers’s long layoff and the lack of preseason action for the first team, but the Jets defense giving up points on eight straight possessions was less predictable. Saleh said the issues that led to that are “definitely going to get fixed” and he’ll get his first chance to show off the repair work in Tennessee in Week Two.
The Titans held a one-point lead when they started a drive with 9:45 left in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s season opener against the Bears.
Tennessee’s defense had played well, with Chicago’s only touchdown coming from a blocked punt that the home team returned for six.
But a disastrous play from Will Levis changed the game, as the second-year quarterback tried to backhand flip a ball away to avoid taking a sack.
Unfortunately for Levis, the ball ended up in the arms of cornerback Tyrique Stevenson, who returned it to the end zone for a go-ahead score — the difference in Chicago’s 24-17 victory.
“Just a bonehead play,” Levis said in his postgame press conference of the pick six. “I think recency bias from getting away with it the last time I did it in a game, just trying to throw it in the dirt. And when you’re getting taken down, you don’t know what’s going to happen to the ball as it comes out. I was really just trying to dirt it.
“[I]t might be one of those times to just take the sack. So, one of the things — of a lot of things — that I can learn from, from this game.”
Levis was 9-of-15 for 67 yards with a touchdown in the first half. He ended the game 19-of-32 for 127 yards with a touchdown, two picks, and a lost fumble as Chicago’s defense clamped down in the third and fourth quarters.
“We just weren’t as efficient,” Levis said of the difference between halves. “The penalties and stuff that we were emphasizing trying to eliminate in that second half kept happening. [We] kept leaving ourselves in third-and-long, just not being efficient on first and second down — which is what one of our keys to this game was. And credit to them, they did a good job of stopping the run and closing the coverage.
“Yeah, we’ve just got to be better. That’s not us. The first half was a winning offensive football game. the second half, that can lose you games. So, just not good across the board.”
Levis and the Titans will try to get in the win column with a home matchup against the Jets next Sunday afternoon.
Caleb Williams got the result he was looking for on Sunday, but the Bears rookie quarterback’s day didn’t go as he would have hoped.
The Bears fell behind the Titans 17-0 in the first half as Williams and the offense struggled to consistently move the ball down the field, but special teams and defense brought them back in the final 30 minutes. A blocked punt and an interception resulted in touchdowns and the Bears pulled out a 24-17 win in the first overall pick’s NFL debut.
Williams was just 14-of-29 for 93 yards on the day and said the post-game celebration included some reflection about what he needs to do in the future.
“I sat down, enjoyed the moment, just watching all the guys celebrate understanding that I need to be better, I will be better,” Williams said, via Josh Schrock of NBCSportsChicago.com. “Whether it’s a win or loss, you expect to play a certain way, you expect yourself to perform a certain way, to make passes, whether it’s just a routine pass or an insane kind of whatever the case may be kind of play itself. That didn’t happen today, so it’s enough motivation for me. We’re going to somebody else’s home this week and so it’s enough motivation for me to go out there and get better this week and make sure I perform differently next week.”
It wasn’t a first chapter from a storybook, but the Bears are 1-0 and Williams has nowhere to go but up in Houston next Sunday night.
For generations, the Bears’ calling card has been their defense.
Even as they drafted quarterback Caleb Williams with the No. 1 overall pick this year, that did not change on Sunday.
With a blocked punt returned for a touchdown and a pick six, Chicago’s special teams and defense led the club to a 24-17 victory over Tennessee to open the 2024 season.
Tennessee raced out to a 17-0 lead, with the team’s defense holding Chicago to just a field goal in the first half.
But things changed in the third quarter, as the Bears blocked a punt and Jonathan Owens — husband of Olympic champion Simone Biles — returned the ball 21 yards for a touchdown, putting the score at 17-10.
The Bears’ offense went on one of its only sustained drives to put Cairo Santos in position for a 50-yard field goal to make the score 17-13.
Then Chicago’s defense started to put the hammer down, as defensive lineman Darrell Taylor strip-sacked quarterback Will Levis, with linebacker T.J. Edwards recovering the loose ball to give the team an extra possession. Santos hit a 48-yard field goal to pull the club within one point.
Titans quarterback Will Levis then made his worst play of the day, inexplicably attempting an underhand flip to avoid a sack on third-and-6. Cornerback Tyrique Stevenson was there to intercept the errant pass, returning it 43 yards for a go-ahead touchdown.
Williams then connected with D’Andre Swift on a swing pass for a two-point conversion, giving the Bears a seven-point lead.
That was 24 unanswered points for Chicago, which was all the club needed. On Tennessee’s last drive, Levis threw an interception to Jaylon Johnson on fourth-and-10 to effectively end the game.
The Bears had just 11 first downs and 148 yards, averaging 2.8 yards per play. Williams finished 14-of-29 for 93 yards. He also rushed for 15 yards.
On the other side, Levis was 19-of-32 for 127 yards with one touchdown, two picks, and a lost fumble. He also rushed for 36 yards. Tony Pollard was effective, rushing for 82 yards on 16 carries with a touchdown.
But it was Chicago’s defense and special teams that made all the difference.
The Titans will have their home opener next week as the club hosts the Jets.
Williams will make his primetime debut, as the Bears go to Houston to visit the Texans.